The Real All Americans

[Diane Merkel]

I know we have a lot of baseball fans on the boards, but nothing beats football! Here's an excerpt from what sounds like a great read:

The most stirring football locker-room speech of all was not the Knute Rockne "win one for the Gipper" halftime address to Notre Dame football players that inspired them to beat Army in 1928, nor was it T.A.D. Jones's telling his Yale players in 1923 that playing Harvard was more important than anything they would do for the rest of their lives. No, the best locker-room speech ever has to be the one delivered by Glenn "Pop" Warner:

"Your fathers and your grandfathers are the ones who fought their fathers. These men playing against you today are soldiers. They are the Long Knives. You are Indians. Tonight, we will know if you are warriors."

The occasion was the momentous college-football game in 1912 between Warner's renowned Carlisle Indian School squad and a vaunted Army team. Carlisle, a small town in southeast Pennsylvania, was the home of an industrial school for Native Americans drawn from reservations across the country. Army was Army, its football-playing cadets (linebacker Dwight D. Eisenhower among them) marching over opponents during the youthful heyday of college football. When the two teams met at West Point on a Saturday in November, memories of the last armed confrontation between Indians and the U.S. Army, at Wounded Knee in 1890, had not yet faded.

Article: online.wsj.com/article/SB118376238098159629.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[harpskiddie]

Thanks for the link, Diane.

Gordie,
no one could be so gentle and so loveable. Oh, my pappa, he always understood.

[Diane Merkel]

Here's a link to a Q&A the author did about the book:

www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=364688&Category=17&subCategoryID=0